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Streamed live on 8 September 2016.

NASA was created when the US Congress passed the "National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958" and it was signed by President Eisenhower. It was the time of the Cold War, nuclear anxiety, and Sputnik, and American felt like it had "lost the space race" already. Soon enough the US launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

But before that happened, there was an interesting and exciting few decades of rocket research that made it all possible. In this episode of RS, Amy Shira Teitel, science historian and author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity : The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA, talked to us all about it. The stories were nearly ballistic and our time was over almost before we got launched.

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Streamed live on 24 August 2016.

There are a lot of venomous creatures on Earth, way more species than most of us realize, and they've invented an amazing and vast array of venoms and technique for injecting it into their enemies, and their dinners. Still, scientists are learning interesting and wondrous things from venomous animals, and also using their knowledge to create new drugs that work in marvelous ways.

In this episode we talked about all these things with Christie Wilcox, author of Venomous : How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry and enthusiastic scientist who studies venomous creatures. We even learned what "sodium channels" are, what they have to do with nerve cells and pain, and how they can be blocked. It was another fascinating hour that went by much too quickly.

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Streamed live 8 August 2016.

Sex! Sex! Sex! That's all we talked about with Carin Bondar, author of Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom. Topics included sexual selection among blue-footed boobies (i.e., the birds), the human preoccupation with NOT talking about sex while thinking about it all the time, and the bizarre sexual practices of some slugs kept coming up, too. Natural selection gave Carin a great deal to write about in her book, and we did our best to fit it all in to one suddenly short episode.

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Streamed live on 4 August 2016.

Our guest for today's program about all the tiniest creatures in the world was Ed Yong, with whom we talk about his highly praised new book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. The multitudes within gave us a multitude of things to talk about, from bad microbes to good microbes and everything in between, but our hour was just too short to cover it all, so reading Ed's book is a must. We guarantee that you will come away with a "grander view of life".

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Streamed live on 7 July 2016.

Acclaimed science writer Mary Roach has a special place in our pantheon here at "Read Science!", because she was our guest for our first episode ever. Imagine how delighted we were to welcome her back to talk about her latest book, Grunt : The Curious Science of Humans at War. Despite some technical difficulties with the internet, we still managed a lively discussion about the book, the technology of warfare, the excellent help that researchers get from human cadavers willed to science, and plenty of behind-the-scenes tidbits.

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Streamed live on 17 May 2016.

Kat Arney, author of Herding Hemingway's Cats : Understanding How Our Genes Work joined us for a very lively discussion about genes--what is a "gene", by the way?--and RNA and proteins and switches and epigenetics and everything else about our modern understanding of the mechanisms that make DNA work, how much of that understanding has changed in the last 30 years, and how to put that understanding together into a coherent mental model. Along the way we had much fun, heard interesting stories, and lost Jeff for awhile thanks to technical glitches.

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Streamed live on 13 April 2016.

After we made today's guest, Paul Knoepfler, author of GMO Sapiens: The Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies, explain what CRISPR is, what it can do, and what we might or might not want it to do right now to make genetically modified babies, we covered a lot of fascinating territory that included genetics, biotechnology, ethics, better-baby contests -- and why these are all really important, timely things to be discussing.

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Streamed live on 6 April 2016.

Roads! Bridges! Curbs! Guard rails! Speed humps! Stop signs, too! Infrastructure is everywhere, including the news lately, because American infrastructure is getting old and decrepit. Today's guest was noted author about all things engineering, Henry Petroski. We talked about taking up the challenges of renewing our infrastructure, and his book on the same topic, The Road Taken : The History and Future of America's Infrastructure.

If you want to know the answer to the question, "In what year were stop signs ruled illegal by courts in Illinois", have a listen.

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Streamed live on 23 March 2016.

In this episode we discussed a comprehensive toolkit for wannabe, burgeoning, or seasons science bloggers was our topic, with guests Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, and Jason G. Goldman, editors of Science Blogging : The Essential Guide.

Editors' websites/blogs are

Christie Wilcox (@NerdyChristie) :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/

Bethany Brookshire (@scicurious) :

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious

Jason G. Goldman (@jgold85) :

http://www.jasonggoldman.com/

The book's website :

http://www.theopennotebook.com/science-blogging-essential-guide/

The book on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/SciBloggingGuide/timeline

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Streamed live on 2 March 2016.

The world of charlatans, con-men, and impostors is murky and a bit scary, but Maria Konnikova is a helpful and fearless guide with her book, "The Confidence Game : Why We Fall for it Every Time". She tells incredible, page-turning stories about the things con artists get away with, why we all have the potential to be duped, and whether there's anything we can do about it.

One defensive tactic, of course, would be to watch our very lively discussion about the book with Maria. Our time was a bit short as we caught up with her during a very busy day of interviews, but we fit a lot into this program regardless.

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